PVL CEO JOY BHATTACHARJYA reflects on the journey of building a volleyball league in India from the ground up. From its early collaborations with the Volleyball Federation of India to establishing a fully independent and commercially sustainable entity. He shares insights into how the league is nurturing local talent, experimenting with formats, and expanding its footprint across languages and regions to connect with India’s vast and diverse audience base.
With a growing roster of sponsors, increasing digital viewership, and a transparent, equity-driven ownership model, PVL is steadily positioning itself as one of India’s most credible and sustainable sports leagues. Bhattacharjya sheds light on the business of sport beyond cricket and the ambition to one day see India compete at the Olympics in volleyball.
In a conversation with Piyush Dhembare, Bhattacharjya discusses PVL’s growth strategies, the challenges of expansion, and the innovations shaping volleyball’s future in India.
EDITED EXCERPTS:
What was the driving idea behind starting a volleyball league in India?
First year the volleyball league came as something that we did together with the Volleyball Federation of India. And of course that didn’t happen. And after that, in 2022, we started building again. And this time it’s completely privately owned, it’s the Prime Volleyball League, with no affiliation or issues with Volleyball Federation of India.
What is the long-term vision for PVL?
Our biggest long-term vision is to make sure that a sport that is very popular in rural and semi-urban India achieves nationwide appeal. We can try and at least get a team good enough to make it to the Olympics. So that is a long-term vision for us. The volleyball league is just a part of it. It’s about playing our part in professionalizing the sport, finding new stars, identifying new talent, and making sure that they come in front of people.
In that case, would you say Pro Kabaddi League is a better template for PVL than IPL?
See, I think you have to look at it in two different ways. One of the things is that kabaddi is also a very rural sport. Rural and urban in terms of how they are. And it’s a sport which had no heroes ten years before. And I think they’ve done a fantastic job. I think our journeys are similar though, difference is that kabaddi is not an Olympic sport, so their journey finishes there. The International Volleyball Federation is also very keen that India does well and go ahead. Not just because they like India, but also because India is such a huge market for all sports that getting a good volleyball league in India is very important, not just to Indian sport, but also to world volleyball.
The number of teams has been increasing with each season. Can fans expect further team additions in the upcoming seasons?
We’ve reached 10 teams now. I think that’s a really good number. Right now, I think the next step is to build this as we are.
Across Indian sports, we’ve seen innovations in traditional formats such as the Impact Player rule in the IPL to the Do-or-Die raid in the PKL, and the Super Point in the PVL. Do you think these changes significantly enhance the viewing experience?
I think we have to innovate and it’s a very interesting thing because when we did this, we did this because of a very different reason. We knew that volleyball in India had no base. No base as in a lot of people playing, but nobody watched volleyball on TV. So that seemed to be a disadvantage, but it was also an advantage because we didn’t have tradition to fight with. So we decided to make a format which we thought would be interesting and engaging to people, and people would enjoy watching. And that’s what the Prime Volleyball League is about. And it’s so interesting that the FIVB calls us their innovation lab because we have the ability to do new things. If you are working in a very established volleyball market, making a change like 15 points and 25 is almost impossible. Because people will protest, because people hate change. But here we can do it. We can show it to people and say, look, this actually works. And in fact, I’ve actually got mails from American universities who were using the super point in their games because it really adds to the excitement of a game when the point is the possibility of a four-point swing instead of just a two-point swing.
PVL recently introduced a Kannada feed on YouTube, taking the total number of streaming languages to six. Are regional language streams a key part of the expansion strategy?
I think not just regional language feed, but I think regional is the key to our strategy. I think our biggest problem is we look at India as one monolith. Where I think a better way of looking at it, especially in terms of marketing, is in many ways similar to the European Union, there are different tastes and interests. We literally got a lot of interest from Kannadigas and we felt that there’s an opportunity there and when we did put out the feed first, it outperformed all feeds other than the Hindi feed. And that tells you that regional languages are a choice. Also, that is the single largest market that is still not totally explored in India, which is semi-urban, rural India, and lots of the regional markets are underserved. So if you want to compete with attention in South Bombay and South Delhi, your product is going to go up, not just against cricket, which is there everywhere, but against Premier League football, against Champions League football and against the NBA. Those are regarded as cool and fun things to do.
You move further away from those places and you’ll find out that there’s a very vibrant culture of watching and being interested in a wider array of things.
Recently, the Isha Foundation, they did a volleyball and throwball tournament across about 3,000 odd villages, 180 centers around seven states, and they want to do it finally from Kashmir to Kanniyakumari. The women play throwball, and the men play volleyball and we actually got the champions down just to meet them because we feel that is where the real growth is going to come in the next 3, 4, 5, 10 years in sport. It’s the places which have not been so well served with sport.
What are the other key strategies?
There are many ways to do it, but I think the biggest thing for us is to actually have all the team owners do substantial work in their own areas. Kochi is opening their own academy, their own tournaments. Bengaluru Torpedoes opened a Bengaluru volleyball academy along with the Padukone-Dravid academy.
So lots of stuff is happening there and I think the key is that you have to build the reach of volleyball. Once the reach is there, then the game will do well by itself. And I think what one of the great encouraging things has been in the past four years, the number of new players who have emerged simply because now volleyball has a future. Suddenly a kid comes in because he suddenly says, “Wow I can be on TV. I can be a star as well”. Every auction we are discovering 4, 5 or 10 new stars who are coming in, and this year is no exception. This year there are Kochi Blue Spikers’ Jasjodh Singh, Mumbai Meteors’ Abhinav Salar and Ahmedabad Defenders’ Harsh Chaudhari.
This season, PVL secured 21 sponsors. What do you think makes brands increasingly confident about investing in the league?
So two things, other than the title sponsor and the presented by sponsor. A lot of the other sponsors, the buys are not big, but they come on and they have an opportunity to engage with us and see how much we do. And we do a lot for sponsors. Sponsor value originally used to be measured by how much of TV time will be given and that’s all it is. Then it became not just your ads on TV, but the running boards. Then the next stage is not just that, they’ll get value on TV, but they’re also getting value on YouTube, which is where we are putting out sponsorships. Now finally, if you look at the entire package, we do special features for almost all our sponsors. And we do a phenomenal amount of work on social media for them as well. So that means a number of things, the number of ways in which we delight them, and we put stuff out for them. And it’s a lot of hard work because it’s discipline after every match. That’s the way you do it. A lot of these sponsors come on year on year with us and they’re growing with us. It’s not just about one or two big sponsors. It’s about doing those little things, the hard work of making sure that that sponsor is happy day after day after day, putting out the product for him. And the more confident he is, the more he is thinking that he’ll be able to put more money on you tomorrow.
How would you describe the league’s growth trajectory so far, and what does the next phase of expansion look like according to your roadmap?
So I think the two things that you’re going to see, for three years we had a great partnership with Sony and Sony LIV. This year Sony is still our partner, but our streaming partner is YouTube. And YouTube is one of the largest mediums in the world to get across. But we are not just putting up something on YouTube. We have a partnership that means we meet them, we speak to them on a regular basis. YouTube has actually worked with our social media and broadcast team, to say what are the things that need to do on YouTube. The flexibility and ability of YouTube, if you think about it, we decided to have an extra calendar channel on 6 October and by 11 October we were up and running. This kind of flexibility you cannot do with broadcast. So what you’re going to see over the next few years is OTT and streaming growing hugely.
Because what’s happening now, the truth is that the top television channels, there’re only two now. There’s basically Sony Sports Network and JioStar, which is the largest by a very big margin. They are the monopoly. So tomorrow, if you want to go on to them, instead of them paying for your rights, they’ll say, pay our fees to air on our channel. So what happens? The result is that they’re taking money from all these small leagues. And putting the money into buying rights like the ICC and the IPL. So in a bizarre way, the richest body in the world, the richest sport in India, cricket is being subsidized by all other sports, which is crazy. And I think the way out of it is people are going to say, it’s not worth it anymore. We’ll find a network to put it on. And I genuinely feel one is streaming on YouTube. I feel there is a huge space for a smart sports channel to position itself and say that they are not making money. They are not gouging you for money to pay for IPL rights and to actually do some great work. So I think there’s an opportunity here as well, but I think that is the way the playbook is going to change over the next two years. Because it’s becoming increasingly unsustainable if a league is going to run and the league knows that it has to pay not only the players, has to do the marketing and has to do the event. And then pay for broadcast as well. It’s difficult for sports to be able to survive in this country.
PVL’s valuation has been recently ascribed as Rs 500 crore+. Is it safe to say this is the current brand valuation of the property?
So I’ll tell how it actually works. When you say brand valuation, people throw numbers, now a lot of those numbers you don’t know how they work. The only safe way to do it, and I think it’s a very simple mechanism. In most leagues, what happens is you join, you become a franchisee, and you’re told to pay X crore a year for the rights. We don’t operate like that. Instead, what we do is we are saying, you join the league, you buy into the league. So the league has a 100 percent equity, say a new team buys 5% equity. So the value PVL is ascribing is the value at which the 5% equity is bought. Once this person joins the league, what happens? We say here are the 10 teams, here are the dates, the approximate budget for this year is 35 crore or 40 crore or whatever it is. So once that number is put in, then all the leagues owners help optimize that number. Maybe that number comes down 2-4 crore, and this number that is there, you take away whatever sponsorship is sold. And whatever remaining number there is, the teams pay on a basis of each team paying a one-tenth of the cost. That’s how it operates. So there are two great things about this. One is that they are league owners and not team owners, which means that even if they’re coming 10th in one season, as long as the league is gaining value, they’re also gaining value. The second important thing about it, and I think this is equally important, is that all budgets in our league are totally transparent. So everyone is confident that nobody’s stealing money because there is no opportunity. We have some of the best minds in the country in our finance committee who can look at our book of accounts on a daily basis.
The point is that in today’s day and age, if somebody’s putting money into you, you must be able to show him the books and say this is where your money has gone. And in our case, it’s the reverse, the process starts with us first presenting a budget and showing them what we are doing, and that transparency is one of the strengths of our league. So the valuation comes from at what number that person bought in that 5% of the league, that’s how that number is coming.
On the matter of financials, and from a P&L perspective, what has been the YoY growth for this edition of PVL?
I think P&L, if you look at it in that sense, comes from two parts. One is from reducing costs and one from increasing sponsorship. And I think we are roughly the same as we were in sponsorship. And I think that’s a great thing to be given how challenging this market is currently. But I think we’ve done a substantial job of actually bringing down costs and I think this year we have been even more efficient. And given the kind of numbers we have got early from both YouTube and Sony, I think our ability to now jack up the sponsorship price has also gone up. So I think that’s great for us.